Purchasing Decorating Equipment and Wallpaper to Decorate Your Home

Decorating your home can be very tricky depending on the features in your room (i.e. number of radiators, fireplace, hanging paintings etc). Decorating your room can be very time-consuming and expensive to paint and hang wallpaper on all walls and there are a few things you should consider with purchasing rollers to paint your walls and the number of rolls of wallpaper to try to buy just the right amount.

Purchasing Rollers to Paint Your Walls

Rollers come in all sizes from 4'' to 18'' but the most popular roller is the 9'' size which you use for emulsioning the walls and ceiling. They can be purchased in a roller set pack as you will need a tray, roller sleeve and roller handle. There are many different types of packs to be bought, just the single roller head, handle and tray, or a pack with an extra roller head or 2 extra roller heads, a brush or a wooden extension pole. These are generally known as DIY Kits, and you can push a wooden pole into the roller handle to extend it when painting ceilings.

There are some Professional Roller Kits available which are of a superior standard. The handles are more solid and a better grip, the frame is stronger which holds the roller head and is called a cage frame, and at the bottom of the handle it has a screw in thread to secure the extension pole should you decide to attach one.

The roller heads that fit these cage frames are 44mm wide and are called trade heads and they won't fit a DIY roller handle as these are only for 38mm wide roller heads. The DIY roller heads are usually made from polyester, whereas the trade heads are made from woven material, mohair or sheepskin.

The length of the fabric on the trade heads vary according to the job in hand. The mohair has a short pile, the woven fabrics have a medium pile or long pile and there is an extra long as well especially for painting masonry.

There are also padded roller heads which due to their thickness are suitable for masonry and rough surfaces like pebble dashing. With these padded rollers they are a different fitting and you need an 8mm stick frame or 9'' double arm roller frame.

Another popular roller is the 4'' size. You can have a small handle or a long reach handle, and on the fitting at the top of the roller you can attach a 4'' medium pile roller head and roll the emulsion paint into narrow spaces. If using a long reach handle then you can easily paint down the back of radiators. The advantage of this roller is that you can easily swap the roller head for a foam roller head which is ideal for using gloss especially on doors. There is also a mohair 4'' roller head which can also your paint a good finish.

Buying Sufficient Wallpaper

When you buy a roll of wallpaper you either buy a plain or a patterned paper. The general rule is you get 4 drops from the plain paper and 3 drops from the patterned paper.

If you intend to buy a patterned paper, check on the enclosed slip of paper for the sign | 64cm, which tells you in this case the match is every 64cm. They also come in various signs, the most popular being 64cm, 53cm and 26.5cm. However, if the patterned paper has a match of 26.5cm or less, providing you trim the surplus paper to the very minimum then you may just get 4 drops per roll depending on the distance from the top of the skirting board to the ceiling.

Having assessed if you get 3 or 4 drops per roll you now have to measure the width of the wall. Most papers are about 520mm (20 ½ ins) wide. Measure each drop at this width and count how many you need. Say its 7 and a bit drops, then 2 rolls of plain will give you 8 drops so that will cover it. However 2 rolls of patterned paper only gives you 6 drops so you would have to buy 3 rolls, and that will give you the 8 drops required plus one drop left over.